Christian Hate-Preacher Goes on Vile Tirade Against Buttigieg, Harris, & Levine

What do you do when your church’s lead pastor, a known spreader of hate speech, is gone for the night?

If you’re Ben Naim of Stedfast Baptist Church in Texas, you step in and pick right up where your mentor Jonathan Shelley left off. It’s why Sunday night’s sermon was just an outpouring of bigotry. It was so awful that it wasn’t even posted to the church’s main YouTube channel — one that they don’t want banned — and posted instead to a semi-secret side-channel where their more hateful sermons go.

I’m just going to show you a couple of clips from the longer sermon mostly because I think it’s worthwhile to know what these New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preachers are saying to their audiences. It’s not like this rhetoric is unique to one guy.

For example, here’s Naim on politicians — specifically Vice President Kamala Harris, whose name he’s unable to pronounce.

… Notice [the verse] says that everyone loveth gifts. Does that not describe perfectly the politicians of our day, on both sides of the political spectrum? You know, they prostitute themselves to corporate lobbyists and special interests.

These people are nothing more than prostitutes. When people go out and vote every four years for the president, let me let you in on a little secret: They’re voting for a prostitute. They’re voting for a whore. They’re nothing more than whores and whoremongers. And in the case of Kamala Harris, she literally is a whore!

I was almost with him for a second when it came to criticizing politicians who are comfortable with lobbyists and special interests… until he took that deranged turn.

But none of that was as vile as his attacks against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine.

It doesn’t end there. In fact, you could argue it gets even worse. You know who our Secretary of Transportation is?

Booty Judge. Pete Booty Judge. This is an open sodomite. OPEN SODOMITE! Pete the [f****t]. Is the secretary — He just bragged on social media about how he took time off to raise… because he just got a child. He adopted a little baby.

He’s going to abuse that baby. Sick disgusting pervert.

Who’s the assistant secretary of health today? It’s a [t****y]! It’s a transvestite! The transvestite freak that calls itself Rachel. That’s our secretary of health. I feel like I’m going crazy! Secretary of health! Is a [t****y*]! Calls itself Rachel! It’s an “it’! I’m just going to call it “it”!

It’s the assistant secretary of health. Of health! This is who we rely on as our leadership in the area of health? A filthy — guy that wears a dress? Some freak that wears a dress? And people share this… they share this thing’s picture all over Facebook. Listen to me — I don’t want to see that. Don’t — I’ll unfriend you. I don’t want to see that! It’s disgusting! It defiles my eyes! Don’t share that photo! I don’t care if you’re exposing it, I don’t want to see it!

It’s disgusting and perverted and filthy! And that’s who we’re supposed to look up to. This is our assistant secretary of health.

Go to Isaiah 59 if you would…

I could argue that Buttigieg was working while taking time off, or that Dr. Levine is fully qualified for her position, but none of that matters to Christian bigots like Naim. They genuinely believe LGBTQ people deserve government-sanctioned death and openly talk about it to a crowd of gullible people looking for any kind of direction. They’re so desperate for leadership that they’ll fall for hate speech spewed by pastors loudly projecting confidence because they don’t want people pointing out their ignorance.

It’s not that this sort of hate represents all Christians — it obviously doesn’t. That said, more mainstream evangelical preachers don’t do much of anything to counter this sort of rhetoric. They’re perfectly fine treating gay people as outcasts who need to be “cured,” or describing trans people as non-existent or in need of mental help, or avoiding the topic altogether. If they don’t speak up, it’s no wonder that more extreme versions of anti-LGBTQ preaching can take hold of people in the pews.